Visual Media Outside the Browser
Originally posted at ScribeMedia.org.
Mental Squatting: The Fight Over Content and its Manipulation
I do not play fantasy sports but to the tune of $500 million annually, many do.
For the uninitiated, fantasy sports lets those of us whose fantasy it is to play or otherwise be involved in professional sports to “own” a make believe team. The “players” on the team are any that belong to a professional league; and one builds a team by drafting and trading players just like real-life sports managers do.
This article originally appeared at ScribeMedia.org.
The success of one’s fantasy team is based on the statistics that the real-life players generate throughout the year.
For example, if I played fantasy baseball, and Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was one of my big boppers, I’d apply his output during his last game along with the rest of the players on my team to generate a score. My opponent would do the same and the winner between me and my opponent would be the collected output that our fantasy players generated in their real world games.
As a side note I’ll add that that if Ortiz really was on my team, I’d be bummed since in real life he recently injured his wrist and has been placed on the disabled list. That means the man known as Big Papi is no longer generating for my fantasy world.
All this is to say that there’s fantasy baseball and fantasy football and fantasy golf, soccer, hockey and even cricket. Sports sites such as ESPN have whole sections dedicated to these fantasy worlds and grown men (yes, mostly men) will argue with life or death intensity over the supposed fantasy value of Player A versus that of Player B.
With 18 million people in the States participating, and numerous sites charging or otherwise monetizing this participation, there’s a lot of money to be had. And for those following the business of all this, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association want a cut of the action.
However, earlier this month, the Supreme Court essentially ended a three-year legal battle between MLB and fantasy sports providers. The case is made bite-sized by Salon’s King Kaufman:
MLB Advanced Media, baseball’s lucrative Internet arm, had refused to renew a license for a St. Louis company called CBC Distribution and Marketing, which runs fantasy leagues. MLBAM, in partnership with the players union, planned to run its own fantasy games at MLB.com, and restrict the number of licenses it granted to a small number of other large sites.
CBC sued, arguing that ballplayers’ identities and stats are in the public domain. Baseball’s argument was essentially that a player’s stats, in connection with his name, are a part of his unique identity just as his face is. It’s not a ridiculous argument, but it lost.
While most reported this as a business and/or legal story, what’s overlooked in the details are two ideas I believe much more interesting, and much more important as well.
First is the entire idea of what content actually is. The second is what happens to content once we figure out what the answer to that very important first question.
Content is a mysterious game. We think of television programs, books and paintings as definitely and deliberately content. It’s something we read, watch and look at. But thinking this way confuses the delivery medium (a film) with the medium itself.
It also leads us to overlook the bits and bytes of our digital culture. For example, the code that creates the software that creates this Web site is content, legible and understandable to those who speak the language. Go through the many files of code that come together to create the page you’re reading these words on and you read a blueprint rather similar to what an architect creates when thinking a building.
Major League Baseball’s argument was fought over the very question of what content is, and who controls it. In their view, generated statistics are part of the sum total of content generated by any given game.
The fact that the New York Mets’ Pedro Martinez pitched 6 innings, struck out 4, walked 2 and gave up 3 earned runs is a fact MLB wants to claim as their own. In essence, they’re saying, these stats are content we’ve created and can assign value to just as this or that painting that hangs in a gallery was created through actions of a painter and is now content with an assigned value. Our content, they appear to say, is not merely the game, or the televised reproduction of that game, but the historical facts, figures and statistics that the game generates as well.
In our day and age where content is simultaneously long-form king and and short-form pauper, there’s a land grab going on by very smart people hoping to monetize both.
Or, perhaps I should say, a mind grab.
That is, while many struggle to figure out business models for content — with even venture capitalists arguing that content itself will eventually be free — all tend to believe and understand that owning or controlling content is in some way very, very important. And lucrative.
And so we see organizations like MLB and the Recording Industry Association of America pushing outwards to lay greater claim over what’s traditionally been seen as their rightful property.
I call this mental squatting, the deliberate attempt to expand one’s hold on content and ideas outwards into the public sphere through copyright, patents, and redefining what the boundaries of content are to begin with.
This is not to say that copyright, patents, trademarks and the like don’t serve an important purpose. Instead, mental squatters attempt to expand their private rights against the commons by making things like copyright ever more stringent, ever more exclusive, and ever more punitive to those who they believe infringe upon them. And if we spin out the MLB argument that the historical results of their games constitutes their content as opposed to being part of the public record, we stumble upon some absurdities.
For example, should newspapers license the right to publish stats from previous night’s games? Should Michael Lewis have licensed the right to use stats when he wrote Moneyball, the much quoted book on managerial innovation in the Major Leagues? Should the cottage industry of statisticians and hard core fans license stats from MLB if they want to publish a comparative study of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and my now injured David Ortiz?
I don’t think so either.
But this is just one example of many that revolve around issues of how content is created, distributed, bought and sold.
It was just the other day that the Associated Press tried to determine how bloggers could quote and attribute them, and just last month that Malcom Gladwell celebrated a group that kicks back, thinks big ideas and then files patents on them in search of future revenue.
And it will be tomorrow, the next day or the next that we have another battle between corporations and the public over who has control and rights over the creation, manipulation, distribution and monetization of ideas, culture and technology.
Stay tuned. There’s squatting in the public commons but there’s still ambiguity over where those commons begin and end.
These Are Two of My Favorite Things
There’s really not much more to be said.
Created by themarkman2001, who’s also created a Family Guy /Braveheart mash.
Following the Herd
When the iPod came to market in 2001, technophiles waxed rhapsodic and it quickly became the must-have gadget among the geek chic.
Sales, of course, didn’t stop there. The pure lustiness of it all catapulted the device to iconic status with the iPod’s white headphones doing for consumer electronics what the Nike swoosh did for sneakers.
But what actually happened that brought the iPod to global status symbol while earlier MP3 players like the Diamond Rio ended up in the historical dust bin?
Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.
Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.
In the video above, John Kearon, Chief Juicer of market research firm BrainJuicer, and Earls discuss specific examples of this phenomenon, how the advertising and marketing industry has changed over the years, and what all this means for products, brands and those that create and market them.
If I were a Rossellini
Isabella Rossellini launches a green porno channel that would do David Lynch proud. A series of 90-second videos gives whole new meaning to the birds and the bees; and earthworms, fireflies, snails, spiders and praying mantises too. File under: hallucination.
That’s Just Groovy
We’ve always liked the eccentricity of David Byrne’s muse. And we definitely like that he’s creating an interactive music installation called Playing the Building. Starting May 31, visitors to New York’s Battery Maritime Building will be able to “play” devices attached to walls, pipes, columns and beams. End result: an urban orchestra where “the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”
Is the Political Center Back
With the primary marathon between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continuing its Energizer Bunny routine by going on and on and on, we take a step back to consider the overall American political landscape with John Zogby and Joel Benenson.
Zogby, President and CEO of the twenty-plus-year-old marketing and polling firm that bears his name, and Benenson, Obama’s campaign pollster, explore the national mood and answer questions about how and where they got things so wrong during the current campaign, notably in California and New Hampshire.
More importantly, they discuss what they believe they’ve gotten right, and point to a sizable and quantifiable shift in the American public from the conservative right, back to — in Zogby’s words — a non-idealogical center.
About this Video
This video was filmed during the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think 2008 Program.
Gail Collins, Op-ed columnist at the New York Times moderates the discussion.
About the ARF
The Advertising Research Foundation’s principle mission is to improve the practice of advertising, marketing and media research in pursuit of more effective marketing and advertising communications.
Information about their upcoming events can be found on their Web site.
“Two out of three voters have consistently told us for the past year and half that the United States is in a serious crisis,” Zogby tells us, and adds that in a recent poll general discontent with the country’s direction reached 74%.
“These numbers are the worst numbers that I’ve seen since Watergate” he adds.
Zogby believes Hurrican Katrina was the breaking point for the American public, a final confirmation that after swinging to the right during the Bush years, “the government in particular wasn’t there when they needed them.”
Benenson draws a different lesson from Katrina. In his view, Katrina’s aftermath gave Americans a common purpose to pull together, with cities like Houston opening its doors to the hurricane’s victims. That commonality, he believes, is the theme Obama’s been able to tap into as he campaigns on the idea of a single America coming together to solve the country’s ills.
Zogby’s research outlines the following landscape:
[The] political middle was on sabbatical in 2004… Only five percent of Americans in late ‘03 and early ‘04 said they were undecided as to who they were going to vote for, the Democratic nominee or George W. Bush. That kind of number is unheard of.
Well, today the middle is back and it’s about a third of American voters and the important thing you need to know about the middle and about all voters is that what they are looking for in this election is, number one, someone who can manage the government; number two, they want someone who has the ability to work across the aisle with the opposition to get the people’s business done; number three, the want someone who can command the military; and number four, they want someone with strong personal values — not to be confused with Christian values. That came out low and continues to come out low…
…. Every one of those values is non-ideological.
Within the landscape that Zogby defines, Benenson outlines his work with the Obama campaign and in particular how they’ve navigated shifting moods, events and dynamics of the primary campaign.
“We… knew that Barack Obama had entered this race with a lot of celebrity,” he says. “but we also knew that when that celebrity faded we would dip in the polls nationally… and we would have to have a lot of intestinal fortitude as criticism got heaped on us from the press, our donors, from our friends and neighbors.”
In particular, Benenson didn’t expect a Clinton win in the New Hampshire primary, nor did he expect Obama’s winning streak throughout February, or again that the two candidates would still be clawing their way to victory here in April.
As we enter the last batch of primaries, and the political chattering class debates super delegates and the damage done to the Democratic party, we think of the polling, market research and data that abounds and wonder if this fall we’ll still be surprised by the course of the 2008 election.
“A lot of people want to think that politics is rational and logical,” says Benenson, “and it isn’t always so.”
Open Systems and the Speed of Innovation
About this Video
This video is a mash-up of the “The Information Machine,” by Charles and Ray Eames. The original was produced for the IBM Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and attempted to demonstrate how modern computing and human creativity were developing hand in hand.
Additional footage comes from the 2007 IBM Global Leadership Forum held in Washington, DC. Those speaking include IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, IBM Senior Vice President for Technology and Manufacturing Nick Donofrio, and US Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.
Credits
ScribeMedia’s culture editor Alexandra Lerman mixed and mashed this video. Michael Cervieri provided the soundtrack.
In the software battle over how people create, produce and consume, lines are being drawn. On one side are those creating Web-based solutions for audio, video, productivity tools and other odds and ends. On the other, are those creating desktop solutions for the very same thing.
All this is on display in a New York Times article from late last year. At root, desktop versus Web-based applications and how knowledge workers will operate in the upcoming years.
The article’s provocative and has a catchy title too: “Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft.”
Rubmbling’s good. Makes me think of seminal grudge matches between the Iron Sheik and Hulk Hogan. Change the panties and we have Google versus Microsoft in a battle over the future of the Internet.
This is all good. The article tells us that Google is creating Web-based versions of productivity tools such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel and that this threatens the very company that made Word, PowerPoint and Excel part of the workforce vernacular.
Back and forth the story goes with each side declaring that their vision is where the future is heading. As the article promises:
The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.
What’s particularly interesting about this heavyweight rumble though isn’t necessarily that it’s a software fight. Instead, it’s that one of the contestents is a nine-year-old company duking it out in a field — productivity applications — that generally falls outside its core competency.
Simply, the speed with which two Stanford doctoral students with an algorithmic idea about search went from start-up to global heavyweight astounds.
Even more astounding is that this speed now feels commonplace. In only a few years Google became a household word, a few years after that a global software giant.
YouTube was founded in February 2005. Twenty months later it was valued at $1.6 billion via acquisition. Facebook began in 2004 as a simple way for some college friends to keep in touch. Today the site has upwards of 60 million registered users.
“Time to value from and idea,” said Carlos M. Gutierrez, US Department of Commerce Secretary, at the 2007 IBM Global Leadership Forum, “has shrunk.”
It’s not just technology companies. Take Starbucks. Founded in 1971, it decided to franchise in 1987 and now has over 15,000 stores worldwide. Or JetBlue. Founded in 1999, it won its sixth straight Conde Naste Traveler Readers’ Choice Award for best domestic airline in 2007. Or echo unltd. Founded in 1993 by Mark Echo, the urban fashion house and media company is now pulling in over $1 billion annually.
What ties these seemingly disparate companies together is their ability to simultaneously rethink their industries and then leverage the infrastructure and resources within them. In other words, they’re taking advantage of open systems rather than creating completely new ones.
“The world is an incredibly open system right now,” said Nick Donofrio, Senior Vice President, IBM Technology and Manufacturing, at the Leadership Forum, “and it’s going to become even more open as we go forward.”
Stretch this out to the world of ideas and solutions, and we see innovations that seem to come out of nowhere but make paper clip sense.
Recent chatter in the blogosphere discussed UPS’s “package flow” software. In particular, how a parcel carrier with 95,000 trucks can increase delivery efficiencies and reduce fuel consumption. The observation that idling trucks waiting to make left hand turns burn fuel and waste time is being resolved by have software map routes where drivers predominantly turn right. The solution, according to the company, has saved three million gallons of gas and reduced emissions by 31,000 metric tons.
In Stockholm, the Swedish Road Administration commissioned IBM to design, develop and operate a new kind of toll system to combat congestion. After the first month in action, 100,000 fewer vehicles were operating during peak business hours, and 40,000 more people were using mass transit. The solution: calibrate toll pricing throughout the city in order to direct drivers to different areas based on pocket book decisions.
“Techonology has enabled us to literally think differently,” Donofrio concluded at the Leadership Conference.
True that. To paraphrase the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christenson, exceptional disruption gives birth to exceptional opportunity. Harnessing that opportunity is the goal. And utilizing it for the common good, the solution.
Dirty Secrets: Making News The Old Fashioned Way
This American Life runs this story with Malcom Gladwell on his early years with the Washington Post.
In some of the publications I’ve been with we’d spell out words from the first letter of every sentence we wrote paragraph to paragraph. E.g., Write a story where the first letter of the first word of each sentence spells, “Inconsequential”.
Done. And done… Just don’t tell anyone about it.
The above’s from This American Life. Story can be found here. And the feed to the Podcast can be found here.
One Laptop Per Child: An Interview with Yves Behar
I’m a big fan of this one. It’s an interview with Yves Behar about the challenges of designing the “toy†that will “save” the world.
Yes, obviously, little things like clean water, lack of insane warfare and the rest are more important but a real device, with real thought behind it can only help.
Sasha captured this while down in Miami. The full shebang can be read/seen here.
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